72 ^ N autohiography fl.. called "Esmé of Paris" (Appleton- Century) 'has ar- rived as a relief and - a surprise among the trickle of half-baked fi ction, trash y war books, Hollywood- ized biographies, and bogus pronounce- ments on public affairs that sometimes makes the reviewer feel that we shall be lucky if we get through this period of 'history with the alphabet intact. These lTIelTIoirs of Esmé Davis have no literary pretensions whatever, but they lTIake an enchanting book of a kind rather difficult to describe except by say- ing that it is like nothing so lTIuch as the semi-picaresque ovels that Compton Mackenzie used to write about a character called Sylvia Scarlett. It ought to be said at the start, in fact, that the book tends to stir one's suspicion of a certain degree of inaccuracy. I am told that it would have been impossible for Miss Davis to have been admitted, as she says she was, to the American Acad- emy in Rome at twelve; and, though she leads us to believe that she is perfect- ly at home in both Italian and Russian, she refers to Rodzianko as the president of the "Duomo," by which she means the Duma, and unaccountably trans- I " f . " h R ates as orelgners t e common us- . d f " " Y . f h SIan wor or men. et, 1 er mem- ory n1ay someti,mes have improved on her experience in the matter of litera] fact, this by no means in validates her book as the story of a human life. Remy de Gourmont said of Casanova that, if his memoirs were a pure fab- rication, "very well, then, Casanova would be the greatest novelist that ever lived. But that is impossible: one does not invent such prodigiously varied ma- terial. " In reading the lTIemoirs of Esmé, I was reminded of Casanova (though not by any erotic element). There are peo- ple whose adventures seem implausi- ble, partly because they have brought to bear in telling them a certain art of the imagination, but also partly because the ad ven tures themselves were orig- inally to some extent the products of a dramatic imagination exercising itself in life. And the drama represented by the adventures is the expression of a mixed personality, an anomalous posi- tion in society, so unusual as to appear incredible. BOOKS The Memoirs of Esmé of Paris The father of Esmé Davis, she tells us, was an Irishman of good Catholic family-they had some property but were rather decayed. He served in India with the Irish Guards and later married in London an opera singer who called herself Maria de Lisle, by whom he had a son and a daughter. The daughter was Esmé and her n1aiden name was Esmeralda Consuela Maria Holland (she took Davis as a name for the stage). Her mother was the daugh- ter of -a Spaniard, who owned a small line of freighters, and an Andalusian gipsy, who was a famous :flamenco dancer. Esmé's mother and father did not live together long: Maria de Lisle, who was an incurable trouper, went back to the opera and concert stage, and her husband, deeply disappointed, became a businessmïn and banker in Canada. Esmé found herself knock- ing about Europe, very often under the care of her grandmother, who was now too old to dance and performed as a professional snake charmer, in an act called "A Night in India," with which she appeared in music hall and circus. The little girl went to ballet school in St. Petersburg and also served there a pretty tough apprenticeship to a brutal Polish circus trainer, who used to hit her on the back of the head till her nerves went to pieces and her sight became im- paired, but he schooled her so thorough- ly at six in bareback riding, trapeze, and ÎVh ------- ./' /ì 1 tumbling that she was able to make her living in a child acrobatic act. As she grew older, she was torn and confused between the elements of her so strangely mixed heritage: the pull of the theatrical world that was in her mother's blood, the pressure periodical- ly brought to bear on her by her distant but anxious father to establish herself in con ven tionallife, and her own quite distinct ambition to get herself a decent education, to study music and painting. \Vhen she succeeded in winning a schol- arship at the American Academy in Rome, she was eventually snatched away by her mother before she had fin- ished her course, and when she tried, in compliance with her father's wish, to adapt herself to a correct English school, or attempted, to please her mother, to settle down at fifteen with a nice English husband, she would pres- ently find herself in trouble: in both cases she violated the code by turning out to be so accomplished a horsewoman -an interest in horses was the only thing she had in common with the up- per-class British-that it could not be concealed any longer that she had once been a professional performer. She soon gravitated back to the stage, the only world where she was sure of her rôle. She danced with Pavlova and Diaghil- ev, and she perfected herself at trapeze; she sometimes designed her own scenery and originated her own acts, finallv com- f'/h , ,, [ \II , 11\\ 5:v: . \ . \ 1' C( '" w \ \ . \\1 1 . \ \ i \ \\ <?